All of the major Republican candidates left in the race at this point speak at great length about fiscal conservatism and cutting back on government spending. However, they neglect one of the largest sectors of government spending: the military.
Currently, every major Republican candidate states that one of their major goals, if elected to office, is to rebuild our military by increasing both the size and the funding of the military. They give a variety of reasons, from the IS, to Russia, to Iran and China. Certainly, these countries do pose a threat in many regards, but the question we should be asking is if this lines up correctly with the candidates' fiscally conservative ideology.
Last year, the United States spent roughly $560 billion on its military. This year, the projected defense budget will rise to $585 billion. Compared to the rest of the world, we spend more on our military than any other nation. Now, some might say that this is not an accurate representation of military spending, as we have the capacity to outspend any other nation due to our GDP.
On that point, they would be correct. If adjusted to accurately represent the percentage of military spending as a portion of GDP, the United States comes in fourth, at 3.5 percent, with a projected fall to 3.1 percent in 2016. This still puts us well ahead of all of the competition — even though we spend less as a percentage of GDP, we still outspend in raw dollar amounts.
The Republican candidates seem to have a problem with the already staggering amount of money we spend to protect our country and project our power and influence throughout the world. As they see it, our inability to defeat unconventional forces or sufficiently threaten countries that go up against our vision for a free world is a sign that our military spending is to blame. The candidates apparently do not recognize the shifting reality of the increasingly complex and multi-polar world in which we now live. From their perspective, it is heresy to think of the United States as anything other than the world’s police.
We must consider the cost of being the world’s police, however. The cost of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan was estimated at an astronomical $1.6 trillion as of late 2014. A better measurement by Harvard's Kennedy School of this, combining “long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs,” estimated that the true cost would be much closer to 4 to 6 trillion dollars.
To help visualize that amount, it would pay for Bernie Sanders’ plans for universal healthcare, free college, etc., with money to spare. Or 330 billion boxes of Twinkies through Amazon — whichever floats your boat.
There is, however, some truth to their argument. Many in the military have said that after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our force readiness is at "historically low levels." That is concerning, but not as much when you think about what should be — but isn’t — the fiscally conservative response: to effectively spend the current budget or even cut it back. If the Republican candidates want to both increase the readiness of our military and substantially cut back on government spending, there are four things they should do.
The first is to stop pretending that we are the world’s police. We shouldn't exacerbate complicated situations with a heavy-handed response. What we should have learned from our expeditions into Iraq and Afghanistan is that going in without a solid plan to leave is a recipe for disaster. Furthermore, we should seriously consider the implications on regional stability that we create when we engage in such actions. Iran wouldn’t be in the position of regional power it is today if we hadn’t disrupted the region in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we wouldn’t have had the rise of the IS unless we invaded Iraq.
Secondly, we need our allies to start bearing some of the costs. NATO, the largest political and military alliance in the world, of which the U.S. is a part, has collaborated on a number of occasions, such as the Bosnian War and the War in Afghanistan. However, one of the major problems NATO has is not from an outside aggressor, but from internal dissent.
The NATO member military spending requirement is 2 percent of a country’s annual GDP. As of 2015, only five of the 28 countries in the alliance meet this goal, leaving much of the burden for defending NATO on the United States. With the threat of a rising Iran and China and the reemergence Russia, the United States is stretched thin on protecting its allies. If we want a fiscally conservative way of cutting costs and protecting our allies, making our allies pay their fair share would be a good place to start.
Finally, politicians will have to be more serious about combating wasted spending in the budget. For example, $8.5 trillion allotted to the Pentagon by Congress since 1996 has been unaccounted for, tanks the army says it doesn’t need have been bought, military bases have been kept open despite their lack of usefulness, no-bid military contracts have been granted and money wasted on rebuilding Afghanistan. This is just a fraction of how wasteful our military has become. Making the budget efficient, rather than just adding to the waste, would be a fantastic and conservative way to cut down on fiscal costs.
This is not the reality, however.
Instead of sticking to their fiscally conservative guns, the Republican candidates have offered nothing but throwing more money into the hole. If they were truly seeking to cut down on government spending, it would be prudent of them to address the massive issues our military faces when it comes to money. Rather than having too little like they insist, I would suggest that the military has more than enough, it just needs to be effective and thoughtful about how it spends it.
Let's dispel once and for all this fiction that the GOP candidates are fiscally conservative. If anything, what truly matters to them is spending more money in areas of the government that they like and less in those that don’t line up with their ideology. Otherwise, they would actually tackle this problem head-on like the great leaders they claim to be.